Otis College of Art and Design is pleased to host the Los Angeles Portfolio Day on January 15, 2017 from 12-4pm!

Bring your portfolio for an informal review by representatives from art and design schools, and learn about their programs of study. Portfolio Day events are held across the country, high school students, parents, teachers, guidance counselors and college transfer students are encouraged to attend.

In acoustical engineering, “tuning the room” is a technique for measuring the specific sound properties of an enclosed space and then adapting the environment to improve its acoustic reflections. New York-based artist Anna Craycroft applies this technique both literally and metaphorically to the Ben Maltz Gallery for her exhibition Tuning the Room. Craycroft’s exhibition asks that we consider how the specific characteristics of an environment shape our experience within it, and how we become attuned in return.

Robin Coste Lewis won the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus. Her writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition: Women in Literary Arts, VIDA, Phantom Limb, and Lambda Literary Review. She has taught at Wheaton, Hunter, Hampshire, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Lewis is a fellow of Cave Canem and of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, as well as a Provost’s Fellow in Poetry and Visual Studies at USC.

Solmaz Sharif’s first collection, Look, was recently published by Graywolf Press and is a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Her poetry has appeared in the New Republic, Granta, Poetry, and other journals. Her first collection, Look, was recently published by Graywolf Press. A former Stegner Fellow, she is currently a lecturer at Stanford University and lives in the Bay Area.

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Patagonia’s design director for outdoor clothing, Wanda Weller (’88) believes that global approaches to recycling and renewable resources will effect significant change. The company’s commitment to sustainable design drives all of its products and activities, including awarding $20 million to more than 1,000 environmental grassroots organizations; working with outdoor companies to build a central fund that has saved more than 34 million acres of wild lands and waterways; encouraging businesses to donate at least 1% of their annual net revenues to environmental organizations worldwide; and recycling used Capilene for new polyester garments.

Weller followed her sister, who studied graphic design, to Otis. As she describes it, “Going to school with people of all ages and backgrounds was fantastic — people with more worldly experience influenced people like me who were just a year or so out of high school. That dynamic was invaluable for me.” She moved to the Pacific Northwest after graduation, where she spent ten years working in the athletic and outdoor apparel industry, at companies such as Adidas and ZIBA. Building on her experience at Otis, she gained a reputation as someone who could communicate with creative designers.

Weller has returned to Otis several times as a fashion design mentor, working with students to impart inspiration derived from limited choices in terms of plant-based dyes and renewable fabrics. Her message about “total beauty” is based on understanding the global impact of manufacturing, and evaluating design in terms of its impact on future generations.